I finally got some time to update my Automated VMware Cloud Foundation Lab (VCF) Deployment script to support the latest VCF 5.1 release as this has been requested by a number of folks both internally and externally. In addition to updating some of the new resource requirements such as increasing the Nested ESXi vSAN capacity…
Month: January 2024
Tips & Tricks for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using Holodeck
The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit has become quite popular amongst our field teams for quickly spinning up a fully self-contained VCF environment, running on just a single physical ESXi host for educational and hands on experience. Internally, we have a Holodeck Google Space which has been getting quite busy where folks can ask…
Preserving VM snapshot hierarchy across vCenter Servers
On occasion, you might find yourself needing to take multi-level VM snapshots for various testing or development purposes, not an uncommon task for IT administrators. In the past, if you needed to move the VM and preserve its snapshot hierarchy, it was usually difficult and involved manual tasks to unregister the VM and copying its…
vSAN ESA and the minimum number of hosts with RAID-1/5/6
I had a meeting last week with a customer and a question came up around the minimum number of hosts a cluster requires in order to use. particular RAID configuration for vSAN. I created a table for the customer and a quick paragraph on how this works and figured I would share it here as…
vSAN ESA and the minimum number of hosts with RAID-1/5/6
I had a meeting last week with a customer and a question came up around the minimum number of hosts a cluster requires in order to use. particular RAID configuration for vSAN. I created a table for the customer and a quick paragraph on how this works and figured I would share it here as…
Google Chat space notification for failed vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backups using VEBA
It is always good idea to verify that your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backups are occurring and if there are any failures, you are notified about them immediately! As alluded to at the end of that blog post, you can easily build event-driven automation using the popular VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution, triggering notifications…
Quick Tip – Verifying vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Backup Status
I recently found out that my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) scheduled backups had been failing for some time but I was not aware. While there is a default vCenter Server alarm for failed VCSA backups, however it is only visible when you have selected the vCenter Server inventory object in left hand navigation, which is…
Experimenting with ESXi CPU affinity and Intel Hybrid CPU Cores
After debugging a recent issue with using VMware Workstation and Intel Hybrid CPUs, it gave me an idea about an experiment to try with ESXi and Intel Hybrid CPUs. As a refresher, starting with the Intel 12th Generation (Alder Lake) CPU, a new hybrid big.LITTLE CPU architecture was introduced for consumer Intel CPUs. This new…